The Haunted House

Sunday, January 25, 2009

Started Tidying the Babies Room

Now that the arrival of the baby is getting a lot closer we have to get the spare room sorted out. Today we went out and bought a baby changing unit and set of drawers. Once we got it back I started sorting out the spare room. I have booked some time off in Feb to paint the room, but I started today by dismantling the spare bed. We are getting rid of this during the week, so guests have to use an airbed from now on :-)

Now that the room has been tidied, we assembled the baby changing unit. Amanda had loads of fun folding up all the baby clothes she has bought already and put then in the drawers.

The room will look very good once we have decorated it. We have decided to paint the walls in a plain neutral color as we want to move house in a years time, but I want to get some 'Princess Peaches' pictures for the wall. Princess Peaches is a super mario character in case you haven't come across the name before :-)

We already have the cot bed ready to assemble and we are getting the pram soon. We don't have a huge amount left to get now, but still a fair amount of money to spend. :-)

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Continuum now available

The new album, Continuum, is now available to stream and buy from my bandcamp page here. It will shortly follow on all the other download stores like iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody, eMusic, Lala, Shock hound, Groupie tunes etc. Then it will be out on CD. Enjoy...

Sunday, January 11, 2009

New album very very soon.

The new creature album, continuum, is really really close to being released now. All the mastering is pretty much completed I just need to listen to the final tracks a few more times to make sure I am happy with it all. So hopefully over the next week or 2 I will get the album first up on to the creature bandcamp page.

The track listing is as follows:

Music Machine

Glide

Robots

Evil Genius

Ronin

Time Machine

The Number

Strange Days

Continuum

Penguin

Codex

Strange Ways

Blue Sky Dub

The album is sounding great if I do say so myself and continues my usual dark sounding adventures, but beats wise this album is quite a lot more lively than my last album Distant Horizon. I hope you like it when I release it.

Remember the first single, Strange Days and Strange Ways, is available to download FREE of charge. I recommend getting it as it is a great introduction to the latest sound of creature. I have been told it sounds very Berlin, what ever that means :-) lol

There Was This One Time at BandCamp...

One of the things I really like about running a small record label and sound design business is the fact that I am not shackled to any larger companies telling me what to do. This leaves me free to try out emerging technologies for launching music projects.

One of these such projects is a Web 2.0 site called Bandcamp. Bandcamp is a site that helps you promote and sell your music to new audiences. They have a few features that I am really keen on trying out.

Firstly they allow a listener to stream an entire album for free. This means I can finally get rid of those dodgy 30 second snippets from the Haunted House Records site. For certain releases I can say whether a listener can download the album for free or pay for it. When downloading an album you have a choice of different formats to choose from like mp3 through to FLAC and Apple lossless formats. This in it self is a great thing as I have had loads of people ask when my albums will be available in FLAC format.

The interesting aspect of the site is that you can allow a listener to pay what they like for an album over a set limit. I have set the limit to $5 min. So you can say what to pay over that. This should be an interesting experiment.

Since I set up the creature bandcamp page I have had loads of people download music from there all of which I can track through bandcamps stats system. This is really good considering I havn't even promoted the site to anyone yet.

For the next album (which is pretty much ready except for final CD artwork) I am going to take a 3 stage approach to its release an an experiment. First I will release it on bandcamp. Then the following month it will go onto the main paid for digital download stores like iTunes and Amazon. Then following that I will release the pysical CD version.

Wednesday, January 07, 2009

Amandas 20 Week Scan

Today Amanda had her 20 week scan at Derby City Hospital. The scan is to check for any abnormalities. Thankfully everything was OK and Amanda and the baby are both in great condition.

We also found out the sex of the baby and we are pleased to say that we are having a baby girl. We are still thinking about names. A boys name was always going to be easy for us to pick as we decided on that ages ago, but we keep on thinking of different girls names. Our current favorite is Aimee Olivia Haunts.

I have taken some photos of the scan pictures. I don't think these pictures are as good as they could have been. The woman doing the scan at the hospital had some much better positions on her screen, but she printed these ones. Not to matter though. There is still a lot of detail in these pictures.

A little while ago Amanda bought a gadget called an Ultrasound Doppler. This is a small gadget that lets you listen to the babies heart beat. Amanda, knowing how much of an audio and music geek I am, got a Doppler that also had a recording line output. So I present to you Aimee's (name subject to change) first piece of ambient music called, Heartbeat ;-) You can download and listen to the MP3 file from this link.